FRAUD CASE
Montrealer’s bid to invoke Jordan ruling rejected
A Montreal man convicted last year of defrauding seniors through an elaborate scheme involving a supposed inheritance from Trinidad and Tobago failed to argue his way out of a similar fraud case Thursday.
Richard Chandroo, 42, had attempted to have a stay of proceedings placed on charges he has faced since 2012 alleging that he used forged documents to defraud a then-24-year-old man of more than $70,000 in 2007.
Invoking last year’s “Jordan ruling ” by the Supreme Court, which set strict limits on the wait times for criminal trials, Chandroo’s lawyer had argued in May it took the Crown too long to bring his client to trial.
But Quebec Court Judge Robert Marchi dismissed the application on Thursday.
“The accused never complained about the delays until the last minute,” he said while reading his judgment aloud for 30 minutes. “He never showed any desire to have an early trial. Even if Jordan was rendered in July of 2016, the accused only announced a Jordan application during his trial and filed it after the Crown’s case.”
Chandroo’s case went to trial in January before pausing late that month for the defence to consider a Jordan application. The case will now resume in October with the defence’s arguments. Defence lawyer Andrew Barbacki refused to comment on the case Thursday. As did Crown prosecutor Emilie Robert.
The Crown alleges Chandroo used an old will signed by his grandfather years earlier in Trinidad and Tobago to convince a young financial adviser to lend him money, promising that he would be reimbursed once Chandroo received his share of the inheritance.
Chandroo’s attempt at having the charges stayed came only months after he was sentenced to 18 months in jail and three years probation for two other cases in which he defrauded three Longueuil seniors — a 79-year-old man and a married couple, ages 84 and 79 — of more than $100,000 under the same pretences.
Chandroo is appealing the conviction and has been released under conditions in the meantime.
In her decision on his sentencing in February, Quebec Court Judge Anne-Marie Jacques shed light on the elaborate scheme Chandroo used to convince the victims in those cases to part with their money — $19,500 and $91,000 respectively — ruling that he knowingly took advantage of vulnerable seniors’ age and naiveté.
To convince the victims, Chandroo showed them his grandfather’s will along with a document describing his estate as being worth more than US$2.5 million, which wasn’t the case. Chandroo needed money to help liquidate the estate, he would tell them, promising it would be paid back once he received his share of the inheritance. He gained their trust, the judge ruled, and misled them into giving him money on several different occasions.
Unlike most common inheritance scams, the will Chandroo used was deemed to appear to be authentic in court. According to evidence presented at the trial, Chandroo’s grandfather, William Chandroo, signed a will in 1992 that was later registered at the High Court of Justice of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.
But the issue was that after Chandroo’s grandfather died in 1995, the estate was liquidated in 2002 and Chandroo had already received his share of the inheritance: approximately $34,000.
According to Jacques’s judgment, when the victims would hesitate to hand over money, they would soon receive a call from someone identifying themselves as Chandroo’s uncle, Teddy, who would reassure them that the estate was about to be liquidated. But when Teddy Chandroo was called to testify under oath via videoconference from California, he denied ever corresponding with the victims at the time.
Jacques noted that Chandroo had partially repaid one victim and mostly reimbursed another, but that it only came after he was sued. In her previous judgment on his conviction, she noted it appeared that Chandroo used the money he had gotten from one victim to pay back the other.
The elderly couple who gave Chandroo $91,000 later described the toll it took on them in a victimimpact statement, explaining how they had withdrawn from different credit cards to come up with the money and had to take a second mortgage on their house as a result.
“We are senior citizens living on
We are senior citizens living on a fixed pension which is slowly becoming not enough to easily meet our monthly payment for utilities.
a fixed pension which is slowly becoming not enough to easily meet our monthly payment for utilities,” they wrote. “Our financial future looks bleak. We are relying on God’s work for assistance.”
The Jordan ruling Chandroo’s lawyer leaned on to have the charges stayed has been at the centre of debate of late as it’s increasingly invoked, including in cases involving violent crimes and murder charges.
The decision, rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada last July, set firm limits on how long an accused should expect to wait for a trial: 18 months for provincial court trials and 30 months for trials in Superior Court. As of last week, the Jordan ruling has resulted in 949 requests for a stay of proceedings in Quebec, 584 of which are in criminal cases.
In Chandroo’s case, after deducting delays caused by the defence and a Crown prosecutor’s illness, Marchi put the net delays at 35 months but ruled that exceptional circumstances allowed for under the Jordan framework should be applied.
“Courts need time to adjust,” Marchi said. “Major efforts have already been made by all participants of the criminal justice system here in Montreal to reduce those significant delay problems. Those delays have already been substantially reduced, but a lot of work needs to be done. Change needs time.”